2016年10月12日 星期三

nutmeg

To help my son understand his coach’s commands, my husband printed out a list of soccer terms and their Japanese equivalents. When he typed into Google Translate the word “matanuki” — the Japanese word for a maneuver known in English as a “nutmeg,” in which one player knocks the ball between the legs of another — it came up with “crotch punching.” Father and son relished that one for days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutmeg_(football)A nutmeg (or tunnel, sometimes just meg in British English slang), is a playing technique used chiefly in association football, but also in field hockey, ice hockey, and basketball. The aim is to kick, roll, dribble or throw the ball between an opponent's legs (feet). It only counts if possession is retained after the ball has passed through the opponents legs. This can be done in order to pass to another player, to shoot on goal, or to carry on and retrieve it.[1]

Mural of Ronaldo nutmegging an opposing player. The work in Berlin was commissioned by Nike prior to the 2006 World Cup in Germany

nutmeg/ナツメグ

The origins of the word are a point of debate. An early use is in the novel A bad lot by Brian Glanville (1977).[6] According to Alex Leith's book Over the Moon, Brian - The Language of Football, "nuts refers to the testicles of the player through whose legs the ball has been passed and nutmeg is just a development from this".[7] The use of the word nutmeg to mean leg, in Cockney rhyming slang, has also been put forward as an explanation.[8]

Another theory was postulated by Peter Seddon in his book, Football Talk - The Language And Folklore Of The World's Greatest Game.[9] The word, he suggests, arose because of a sharp practice used in nutmeg exports between America and England. "Nutmegs were such a valuable commodity that unscrupulous exporters were to pull a fast one by mixing a helping of wooden replicas into the sacks being shipped to England," writes Seddon. "Being nutmegged soon came to imply stupidity on the part of the duped victim and cleverness on the part of the trickster." While such a ploy would surely not be able to be employed more than once, Seddon alleges it soon caught on in football, implying that the player whose legs the ball had been played through had been tricked, or, nutmegged.[8]